Mouth Piece: Diane Borsato’s synesthetic thrills launch the Mois de la Photo

By Isa Tousignant
Hour
cover and article
Montreal, September 2005

Diane Borsato’s synesthetic thrills launch the Mois de la Photo à Montréal.

Not everyone gets their kicks sleeping with cakes, inhabiting garbage piles or touching strangers at every possible opportunity. But Diane Borsato is an artist.
“That’s what performance artists are for! To walk around with slightly different rules around them and just act out these fantasies, make little subversive gestures and cross these regular boundaries. They usually are sensible boundaries – everyone can’t go through the glass of museum vitrines, or we wouldn’t have artifacts. But at least if one person can act out those possibilities, it makes them available for everyone later to contemplate.”

Borsato, now living in Toronto, is opening a solo show at Galerie Occurrence on Sept. 10 called How to Eat Light as part of the citywide photography festival Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal. The artist has left her mark on this town in more ways than one, whether in the frequency with which her work continues to be shown here or in the way she affected people when she called Montreal home. “I lived there for four years while I did my MFA at Concordia and I’m always coming back – I feel unable to become an Ontario artist,” she laughs.

Borsato has shown in both Canada and internationally, including at Skol, La Centrale, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto, Artspeak in Vancouver and the Villa Arson national centre of contemporary art in Nice, France. A couple summers ago she was part of the wonderful Orange art project, and, most recently, she worked with a group of west-end

high school students for her contribution to the Liane and Danny Taran Gallery’s massive Décarie Project.

The majority of the works exhibited in How to Eat Light form what she calls a “loose, ongoing series” of photographs of various performance acts she makes. All constitute large colour prints displaying either a single or selection of telling moments recording a happening of some sort, and an accompanying text explaining the idea. They’re always funny on some level – either quizzical, or odd, or outright laughable. “It’s absurd and imaginative,” says the artist. “They’re eccentric experiments that I carry out to see if this hypothesis or this question or this wondering is true.”

Some of the things she’s wondered about is whether her dad would ever get tired of holding the world up, or whether dead people miss the reassuring warmth of a hot meal, or whether comfort food like cake is actually comfortable to sleep with. She’s also experimented with public touch by giving herself the assignment of touching at least 1,000 strangers in a month, and she’s sought to dismantle the social institution of museums by gaining access to some of their precious objects and getting up close and personal, like with the peacock on the cover this week.

“Do you know the word ‘synesthesia’? “ she asks. “This way of crossing the senses whereby some people see sound, hear colours, things like that. In some of my pieces, there’s food that’s available for touch, or light that you taste. Things that are visual I put in my mouth, like in Artifacts [In My Mouth]. Things that you see behind museum glass usually, I want to have this altogether different relationship with, that’s intimate, in my mouth, and that I smell.”

“I like playing with objects as if they were subjects. Addressing them, teaching them, having them teach me things, leaving food for them. It’s about the liveness of inanimate things and the relationships – really, relationships – we have with them. Sometimes it’s easier to talk about relationships with people by substituting them for an animal or an object or plant or something like that. It becomes a metaphor for other kinds of relationships and it’s a way of modelling all sorts of other possibilities.”

The process isn’t always as pleasant as it looks, though. For me, the Artifacts piece carries a visceral potency that’s particular, probably because of my lifelong experience of the stuffiness of museums. I can imagine the stickiness of sleeping with cakes or the discomfort of waiting by the curb crouched in a garbage bag in an attempt to become one with trash, but I can’t even imagine the pleasure of wrapping my lips around things deemed by humanity as artistically precious. Was it as thrilling as I imagine?

“It was horrible!” Borsato answers, to my dismay. “Everything tasted like dust and mould, and I don’t know what kind of hazard I subjected myself to. But the photo with the model of the solar system, where I actually have the moon in my mouth – I get to be for a moment the queen of the solar system or something, and suddenly my scale changes. It’s a whole different way of knowing.”

Article URL: http://www.hour.ca/visualarts/visualarts.aspx?iIDArticle=7095